Darkness Between the Stars

by J. Edward Neill

  And yet none of it bothered me.

  Cal and I passed from one of the Ring’s eight rooms into the next. Even though the path around the entire ship wasn’t quite a half-kilometer long, the curvature of each room was such that it felt almost like walking on flat ground. Looking out the windows, I saw the stars spin by. Of course, they weren’t spinning. We were.

  Actually, everything’s spinning, I remembered something Mom had said. You just can’t always see it.

  “How long until we get to Ebes?” I asked Cal. “Abid and Tiana told me, but I wasn’t listening.”

  “You know…for the savior of Earth, you’re awfully flippant,” she countered.

  “Savior?” I scoffed. “Sometimes I get the feeling this isn’t about saving anyone. Sometimes I—ugh…never mind.”

  “The answer is four years, three months, seven days, and one hour.”

  “You sound like one of Abid’s sprites,” I laughed and moved my arms like a robot. “Four years, beep. Three months, bop.”

  She didn’t smile.

  “I guess I’ll be asleep for most of it,” I said. “In a box. I wonder if I’ll dream. Will you sleep, too?”

  Cal looked at me. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought she was trying to be sympathetic.

  “You won’t dream,” she said. “Your brain processes will slow to a point that REM sleep doesn’t exist. As for me…” She looked sad. “…I’ll scatter myself throughout your sleep chamber. It’s my job to monitor you.”

  “You’ll get bored,” I observed.

  “Very,” she admitted.

  “I’ve been thinking.” I changed the subject. “And I’ve realized that if I go to sleep in a few weeks like Doctor Abid wants, and if I wake up only a month or so before we reach Ebes, these next few weeks could be my last. I mean…if ninety-two people failed before me, odds are I’m doomed. So that means, technically speaking, I’m near the end of my life.”

  Callista opened her mouth to make a joke, but stopped. Her expression was more human than anything I’d seen in years. She looked miserable.

  “You can’t think like that, Joff.”

  “Sure I can.”

  “But you shouldn’t.”

  “Fine. Let’s distract ourselves.” I walked over to the one of the windows and looked for Earth, but couldn’t find it in the spinning backdrop of stars. “Let’s play a game.”

  “A game?”

  “Yeah. A game. It’ll be fun. Soooo…we’re going how fast right now? Like two-hundred thousand kilometers per minute? And after I’m asleep we’ll accelerate to faster-than-light? Just think…with those kinds of physics…how easy it’d be for us to die.”

  “This is the game you want to play?” Cal crossed her arms.

  “Yes. Here’s how it goes: I name a realistic way we could both be annihilated, then you do the same. Whoever runs out of death ideas first, loses. I’ll go first. Ok?”

  She made a face. And I knew she liked the idea.

  “Ok. Here goes,” I began. “If the primary and backup gravity controls fail, we’ll both be turned to powder.”

  “No. Wrong,” she corrected. “We’d only be turned to powder if we accelerated or decelerated too quickly. Of course, at the speeds we’re going, it’d take decades to slow down without killing you. So you’d die of old age. But I’d survive.”

  “Fine. Old age. That’s my answer. Your turn.”

  She touched her tiny finger to her chin. “Well…if you fired the Sabre’s quantum engines too close to The Ring, you’d likely disrupt The Ring’s shape ever so slightly. Even a moderate breach of The Ring’s integrity would make it uninhabitable. We’d be stranded on the Sabre. I’d survive for hundreds of years. You’d run out of food in a month.”

  “So you’d have to mercy-kill me?” I cracked.

  “That was my next one.” She smiled. “Two points for Callista, one point for Joff.”

  We circled The Ring twice more while playing our game. We passed through three storage pods, each of them packed with crated food, and we laughed the whole way through. We talked louder inside the recirculation pod, in which water reclamation and life-support systems hummed away. In the sleep pod, we asked a sprite to turn the lights on and we laughed at how big a mess we’d made after just a few days. We cut through the kitchen pod, which I’d have needed Mom to make any real use of, and the recreation pod, mostly filled with heavy things I’d have to lift to get myself back into fighting shape after hibernation.

  Finally we came to the observation pod, which was completely empty. To counterbalance the weight of the three storage pods spinning on The Ring’s opposite side, the observation pod’s ceiling and floor were packed with lead plates. But its windows were clearer than anywhere else, made of a polymer I couldn’t pronounce, giving us full view of the stars.

  I stood with my nose against the window. The stars spun in my vision, but after a while of watching, it felt like I was hardly moving at all.

  “We’re going so ridiculously fast,” I whispered.

  Callista floated over and sat on my shoulder.

  “And we’re speeding up,” she said. “In two days, we’ll pass near Saturn. In another eight days, we’ll be way out in a cloud of dust and rocks. And a few days later, we’ll be completely out of our solar system.”

  The thought made me shiver.

  “And I’ll take a four-year nap.”

  I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Do you think they talk about us back home?” I asked.

  “How do you mean?” She tickled my ear with her tiny foot.

  “Like Castyn Clarke and the Dusktime Dispatch. Do you think she does a nightly report on how close we are to Ebes? Are people turning on their skypads to hear our story? Did they tell the world what we were doing in the fortress? About the Sabre, the S.R.’s, and our training?”

  “Who’s Castyn Clarke?” The way she looked at me told me she really didn’t know.

  “Sometimes I forget they didn’t tell you all this stuff.” I sagged. “You’re not like a sprite…those little know-it-alls.”

  “I just thought of another way for you to die.” A wide grin broke out on Cal’s face.

  “What’s that?”

  “I kill you in your sleep for comparing me to a sprite.”

  We both laughed.

  It felt good to have a friend.

  * * *

  I awoke to the feeling of Callista slapping my cheek.

  “Wake up, Joff. Something’s happened.”

  Startled, I sat up. My face hit her arm, and little nano-bits scattered in several directions, a blue cloud of sparkling light in an otherwise dark sleeping pod. It didn’t seem to trouble her. She shot me an annoyed look, but then floated in place until all her glowing bits drifted back to her.

  Within five seconds, her tiny body was whole again.

  “Sorry.” I rubbed my eyes. “You scared me.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “As I was saying, something happened a few minutes ago. You should power up the control console and look at it.”

  “Something bad?” I worried.

  “Just get out of bed and we’ll look at it together.”

  Uh oh, I thought.

  The lights flickered on. I tossed a dark tunic over my shoulders, slid my feet into my sandals, and marched straight to the table opposite my bed. With one tap, the table’s surface awoke the same as a skypad, only much bigger.

  “Ring,” Cal addressed the ship’s computer, “show Joff the event from six minutes ago.”

  “Retrieving,” the computer replied. She sounded more than a little like my mother.

  I watched as an exterior image of the Ring popped onto the screen. I saw the pods rotating as usual, the Sabre locked in the center. Nothing looked out of place. My heart stopped pounding.

  “Ok, what am I missing? What event?”

  “Ring,” Cal said, “show it again, but this time slow the feed to one-thousandth of one percent speed.”


  “One-thousandth?” My eyes widened.

  “Just watch.” Callista pointed.

  I watched the screen, and there it was. It was just a silver streak, lasting not even a half-second. It passed a few hundred meters away from the storage pods, going in the opposite direction as the Ring.

  “Whoa…” I exhaled. “Was that a meteor? A piece of debris? If it would’ve hit us…at this speed…we’d have been completely destroyed.”

  “Exactly,” Cal agreed.

  I faced her. “But we’re way out in the middle of nowhere. We’re past the asteroid belt. We’re coming up on Jupiter. The odds of something being in our flight path are…pretty low. Right?”

  Cal opened her mouth to answer, but the ship’s computer chimed in first.

  “The odds of colliding with any object larger than fifty millimeters in diameter are approximately two million to one. Our flight path matches that of the Exodus ships, and we are a much smaller vessel.”

  “So what was it?” I asked.

  “Unknown,” answered the computer.

  “I think I have a guess,” said Cal.

  I tapped the tablepad to power it down. “Well?” I looked up at Cal.

  “We already know Ebes and Earth shuttle contraband back and forth.” She looked deadly serious. “They send communications, encrypted data, and illegal materials. And as we’re on the fastest primary route between locations, it stands to reason—”

  “They just sent something back to Earth.”

  Cal raised her tiny blue eyebrow, and I knew I’d guessed right.

  “What if they send another,” I wondered. “What if we hit it?’

  “Nothing we can do. Not really.” She looked glum.

  After that, I was too tired to sleep. I couldn’t help but obsess over what we’d seen.

  What was in it?

  Instructions to people like Wendall Wight?

  Plans for another Exodus ship so Frost’s supporters can leave Earth?

  Weapons?

  In silence, we left the bedroom behind for the smooth chrome walls and white countertops of the kitchen. I figured the best way to recover from the shock was to eat. While slurping up a bowl of reconstituted soup, I grilled Cal about what she thought the mysterious parcel might have been. I considered Abid might’ve programmed her to lie to me, but if she did, I couldn’t see it in her eyes.

  After eating a dry, awful-tasting brownie, my mind strayed to darker thoughts.

  “I wonder what happens to a planet if one of Abid’s S.R.’s hits its star.”

  “They’re not Abid’s S.R.’s,” Callista reminded me. “They’re Ebes’.”

  “Right. But still, I wonder what happens.”

  She fluttered in a circle and touched down on the table. Wherever she walked, little puffs of blue light floated into the air.

  “When the strings of a burning star are told to become something other than hydrogen, a chain reaction begins,” she explained while pacing atop the table. “Nuclear fusion ceases, and the star goes momentarily dark. Of course, there will still be an inconceivably large amount of mass piled on top of itself, and so the star might collapse, explode, or simply shrink into a dense terrestrial mass, depending on its size and density. Any planets in the system will begin rapid cooling within hours of the star’s death. Within a few days, most will be completely frozen. All life forms, except perhaps those living in the deep ocean near volcanic vents, will die. If the star happens to suffer a violent explosion, any planets in its supernova radius will either be ejected from their orbits or melted. Or both.”

  The way she said it surprised and chilled me. “I guess they taught you some things after all.” I shivered.

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Doctor Abid thought it was important for me to understand the weapon of the enemy. I think he meant to explain it to you as well, but with our launch happening early, he didn’t have time.”

  “Early?” I made a face.

  “We weren’t scheduled to leave until another three months from now,” she said. “I take it you scrunching up your eyes like that means you didn’t know.”

  “No one told me.”

  I ask more questions. I demanded to know why we’d left early, why Abid hadn’t told me about the planned launch date, and why everyone kept so many secrets. If Callista had been human, I think my anger might have made her cry.

  But she took it. Either they’d programmed her with a powerful sense of compassion, or she’d learned to be truly sympathetic about my plight. I wanted to think it was the latter.

  “I know you don’t trust me,” she admitted at my rant’s end.

  “That’s not—”

  “No, it’s ok,” she interrupted. “I realize all the things they could have programmed me to know. They could’ve stuffed my cells with knowledge of everything they’ve been up to, with everything they did. And they could’ve slipped in a program to make me lie about all of it. You wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.”

  “Well maybe I could have—”

  “No. You couldn’t have.” She wagged her finger. “But let me tell you one thing, Joff. I’m not lying. Never. Not to you. I don’t know whether they programmed me to care or whether I’ve learned it on my own, but you’ve always gotten the truth from me. And you always will.”

  I sank into my chair and gazed out onto the spinning stars. I felt awful for questioning her.

  “If you were big enough, I’d hug you,” I murmured.

  She sat on my shoulder and looked out the window with me. “And if you were smaller, I’d do the same.”

  Intermission

  They said I wouldn’t dream.

  I did.

  After climbing into the hypo-chamber, I’d taken a few moments before tapping the button that would put me into stasis for four years. The front of the cylindrical chamber was glass, through which I saw Callista, her palm on the window. I fought the urge to cry, but seeing the look on her face hurt me more than I thought myself capable of.

  A few days prior, she’d told me she loved me.

  And I’d realized I felt the same.

  We were all each other had.

  I pushed the button. I didn’t feel the bitter cold wash over me. I didn’t sense the pain of the injectors lancing into my neck. The only thing I felt was loneliness, and the only thing I saw was Callista.

  And then darkness washed over me.

  I drifted away from reality. I tumbled. I collapsed. I was no longer Joff, only a small shadow of him. The days felt like grains of sand falling through a bottomless hourglass. My body and mind were supposed to be utterly frozen in stasis, and yet some sensations remained.

  I could feel the passing of time. Somehow, someway, I was aware. My first dreams were brief, maybe a few minutes long. Then later, perhaps several months into my slumber, my thoughts started to stretch out across longer and longer periods.

  I remembered thinking I was still alive, and knowing that if I’d died, the sensations would’ve been different.

  I dreamed of the farm, of Mom and Dad, of my life the way it used to be. The dreams weren’t small segments, but vast stretches of time full of more detail than reality itself. I lived and relived countless days, and I was happy.

  And somewhere, deep down in the bottom of my mind, far from all the other dreams, I swore I heard Callista’s voice. Was she singing? Humming a familiar tune as she performed routine checkups on my condition? I wasn’t sure, but there she was, always present on the edges of my perception.

  It sounded like she was trying to sing to me.

  Maybe she was, maybe not.

  I felt other things, too.

  Even down in the dark, I retained some sense of memory. I plucked thoughts from the void like flowers from a garden, and I planted them in a house made of shadows. Perhaps Callista poured the ideas into my head through the cables connected to my body, or perhaps I dreamed them all by myself. All I knew was every day I felt more and more aware.

  What is this plac
e? I asked myself.

  How are there endless green fields here, but no sun and no rain?

  If my brain is asleep, how can I think? Move? Remember?

  Is this Ebes I’m dreaming of? They never really told me what it looked like. Is this another part of my training?

  I asked thousands of questions, but earned no answers. After many months, or at least what I thought were many months, I wandered away from my farm, my parents, and Callista’s voice. I came to a starlit field in which grey grass swayed. I couldn’t feel the wind. I counted the stars, and they were fewer than ever before. A small sense of fear crept into the corner of my mind, and every day thereafter it grew more powerful.

  Even though I was asleep, I dreamed myself sleeping.

  And I dreamed myself dreaming.

  And my dreams became dark.

  You’re not going where you think you’re going, a voice told me. You’re in for a surprise. A terrible truth awaits you.

  I awoke from sleep within sleep. In the grey field, I glimpsed shadows moving at the edge of perception. I imagined they were the Exodus people, Frost and all his minions, and they knew I was coming. On the horizon they stood in a great line, black weapons in hand, smiling but saying nothing.

  I tried to tell myself the shadow people were just projections of my real-life fears. Before entering the hypo-chamber, I’d gone through all the possibilities.

  This is a trap.

  Wendall Wight told them I was coming.

  The silver streak we saw near The Ring was a package meant for Earth boasting of my imminent failure.

  They’ll have ships awaiting me, armed with weapons Abid and his scientists hadn’t dreamed of.

  I walked closer to the line of shadows. My dream bordered on becoming a nightmare. Only through sheer force of will did I continue across the grey field to look at my enemies’ faces.

  And then I saw them.

  Their eyes were dark. Their faces were stretched, and their limbs skeletal. They weren’t human after all. I remembered something Abid had once told me, that the Exodus people had likely altered their genetics in order to survive the atmospheres of new planets.

  But this wasn’t that. The things I saw standing on the horizon weren’t human, nor had they ever been.